Anagear's Low-Power Circuits Harvest & Save Energy

A Dutch company aims to change the way low-power electronics are designed by creating a separate component for power management to reduce the need for battery power in wireless sensor networks and other applications.

Anagear, based in Rosmalen, The Netherlands, recently came out of stealth mode with its first family of ultra-low-power circuits and a developer kit aimed at providing OEMs and electronics designers with a different way to manage the power in small devices that will save more energy than current methods, said Guus Dhaeze, vice president of sales and marketing for Anagear. "In applications like wireless sensor networks, a lot of those devices are not active all the time -- they are in active standby mode in order to save power," he told Design News.

Generally, the system's microcontroller manages this standby mode, but because of the leakage current in this type of design, "they are not the best products to do this management of power consumption in a device," Dhaeze said.

Anagearís ultra-low-power circuits are aimed at separating power management in low-power devices from the microcontroller in order to reduce the need for battery power and make way for alternative energy sources, such as solar power. (Source: Anagear)

Enter Anagear's ANG line of analog circuits, which aim to take power management out of the controller and provide a more efficient way to provide a standby mode for small devices.

Anagear's ICs achieve this in three key ways. First, the circuits take over complete control of the power-management system and switch off every other component that is not needed in standby mode. "Even the microcontroller is switched off," he said. The circuits utilize voltage scaling to convert the power of external components to the system to the bare minimum. "If you attach a microcontroller at 1.2 volts, we can deliver at that level. The circuit doesn't consume more."

During standby mode even when the microcontroller is not active, the Anagear circuit can autonomously monitor critical system voltages, such as how much energy is left in the battery and what the internal temperature of the system is. "As long as those signals remain within certain limits, there is no need to alarm the system and wake up the microcontroller," Dhaeze said.

ANG currently has three circuits in its line. The premium offering, the ANG1010 integrated circuit (IC), includes power management and supervisory controller for battery- or photovoltaic-powered systems. This circuit can plug into an indoor solar panel to offer an alternative power source to a battery. "People can connect a small solar panel for indoor use directly to our chip and we harvest the energy, storing it from the solar panel into a hydrorecharageable battery or supercapicitor," Dhaeze said.

Not if meets the right balance of cost and performance. If it adds too much cost to the BOM then only the designs trying to squeeze every last nanowatt will want the part. On the other hand, if they get the part under a dime in volume then I can use a cheaper, power guzzling micro and spend the dime on their part. It's another performance/cost trade off.

It definitely seems like Anagear is on to something here with its preservation of power it manages by taking power management out of the microcontroller. It seems a fairly simplistic idea and will be interesting to see if this takes off. I wonder if designers might balk at making this change to the time-worn design.

Very true, so many designs simply need to wake up every second or so to make a measurement and that clock circuitry usually takes a few microamps. Microcontroller vendors have gotten better at providing a low current wake-up but aren't really there yet.

ZiLOG has a pretty nice watchdog circuit in their Encore parts that can do it with less than a microamp.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

Kaspersky Labs indicated at its February meeting that cyber attacks are far more sophisticated than previous thought. It turns out even air-gapping (disconnecting computers from the Internet to protect against cyber intrusion) isnít a foolproof way to avoid getting hacked. And Kaspersky implied the NSA is the smartest attacker.

Focus on Fundamentals consists of 45-minute on-line classes that cover a host of technologies. You learn without leaving the comfort of your desk. All classes are taught by subject-matter experts and all are archived. So if you can't attend live, attend at your convenience.